July 16, 2013

How to Be a Rogue Superpower

A Manual for the Twenty-First Century By Tom Engelhardt

It’s hard even to know how to take it in. I mean, what’s really
happening? An employee of a private contractor working for the National
Security Agency makes off with unknown numbers of files about America’s
developing global security state on a thumb drive and four laptop computers,
and jumps the nearest plane to Hong Kong. His goal: to expose a vast
surveillance structure built in the shadows in the post-9/11 years and
significantly aimed at Americans. He leaks some of the documents to a columnist at the British Guardian and to the Washington Post. The response is unprecedented: an “international manhunt” (or more politely but less accurately, “a diplomatic full court press”)
conducted not by Interpol or the United Nations but by the planet’s
sole superpower, the very government whose practices the leaker was so
intent on exposing.

And that’s just for starters. Let’s add another factor. The leaker,
a young man with great techno-savvy, lets the world know that he’s
picked and chosen among the NSA files in his possession. He’s releasing
only those he thinks the American public needs in order to start a
full-scale debate about the unprecedented secret world of surveillance
that their taxpayer dollars have created. In other words, this is no
“document dump.” He wants to spark change without doing harm.

But here’s the kicker: he couldn’t be more aware of
previous whistleblower cases, the punitive reaction of his government
to them, and the fate that might be his. As a result, we now know, he
has encrypted the
full set of files in his possession and left them in one or more safe
places for unknown individuals -- that is, we don’t know who they are --
to access, should he be taken by the U.S.

In other words, from the time Edward Snowden’s first leaked documents
came out, it was obvious that he was in control of how much of the
NSA’s secret world would be seen. It would be hard then not to conclude
that capturing him, imprisoning him, trying him, and throwing away the
key is likely to increase,
not decrease, the flow of those documents. Knowing that, the Obama
administration and the representatives of our secret world went after
him anyway -- after one man on a global scale and in a way that may not
have a precedent. No thought of future embarrassment stopped them, nor,
it seems, did they hesitate because of possible resentments engendered
by their heavy-handed pressure on numerous foreign governments.

The result has been a global spectacle, as well as a worldwide debate about the spying practices of the U.S. (and its allies).
In these weeks, Washington has proven determined, vengeful,
implacable. It has strong-armed, threatened, and elbowed powers large
and small. It has essentially pledged that the leaker, former Booz
Allen employee Edward Snowden, will never be safe on this planet in his
lifetime. And yet, to mention the obvious, the greatest power on Earth
has, as yet, failed to get its man and is losing the public opinion
battle globally.

An Asylum-less World

Highlighted in all this has been a curious fact of our
twenty-first-century world. In the Cold War years, asylum was always
potentially available. If you opposed one of the two superpowers or its
allies, the other was usually ready to open its arms to you, as the
U.S. famously did for what were once called “Soviet dissidents” in great
numbers. The Soviets did the same for Americans, Brits, and others,
often secret communists, sometimes actual spies, who opposed the leading
capitalist power and its global order.

Today, if you are a twenty-first-century “dissident” and need asylum/protection from the only superpower left, there is essentially none to be had. Even after three Latin American countries, enraged at Washington's actions,
extended offers of protection to Snowden, these should be treated as a
new category of limited asylum. After all, the greatest power on the
planet has, since 9/11, shown itself perfectly willing to do almost
anything in pursuit of its definition of “security” or the security of
its security system. Torture, abuse, the setting up of secret prisons or “black sites,” the kidnapping of terrorist suspects (including perfectly innocent people)
off the streets of global cities and in the backlands of the planet, as
well as their “rendition” to the torture chambers of complicit allied
regimes, and the secret surveillance of anyone anywhere would only start
a far longer list.

Nothing about the “international manhunt” for Snowden indicates that
the Obama administration would be unwilling to send in the CIA or
special operations types to “render” him from Venezuela, Bolivia, or
Nicaragua, no matter the cost to hemispheric relations. Snowden himself
brought up this possibility in his first interview with Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald. “I could,” he said bluntly,
“be rendered by the CIA.” This assumes that he can even make it to a
land of exile from somewhere in the bowels of the international terminal
of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport without being intercepted by
Washington.

It’s true that there remain some modest limits on the actions even of
a rogue superpower. It’s hard to imagine Washington dropping its
kidnappers into Russia or China to take Snowden, which is perhaps why it
has put such pressure on both countries to turn him in or hustle him
along. With smaller, weaker lands, however, non-nuclear allies or
enemies or frenemies, don’t doubt the possibility for a second.

If Edward Snowden is proving one thing, it’s this: in 2013, Planet Earth isn’t big enough to protect the American version of “dissidents.” Instead, it looks ever more like a giant prison with a single implacable policeman, judge, jury, and jailer.

Deterrence Theory the Second Time Around

In the Cold War years, the two nuclear-armed superpowers practiced what was called “deterrence theory,” or more aptly MAD,
short for “mutually assured destruction.” Think of it as the
particularly grim underside of what might have been but wasn’t called
MAA (mutually assured asylum). The knowledge that no nuclear first
strike by one superpower could succeed in preventing the other from
striking back with overwhelming force, destroying them both (and
possibly the planet) seemed, however barely,
to hold their enmity and weaponry at bay. It forced them to fight
their wars, often by proxy, on the global frontiers of empire.

Now, with but one superpower left, another kind of deterrence theory
has come into play. Crucial to our era is the ongoing creation of the
first global surveillance state. In the Obama years, the sole
superpower has put special effort into deterring anyone in its labyrinthine bureaucracy who shows a desire to let us know what “our” government is doing in our name.

The Obama administration’s efforts to stop whistleblowers are becoming legendary. It has launched an unprecedented program
to specially train millions of employees and contractors to profile
coworkers for “indicators of insider threat behavior.” They are being
encouraged to inform on any “high-risk persons” they suspect might be
planning to go public. Administration officials have also put much punitive energy
into making examples out of whistleblowers who have tried to reveal
anything of the inner workings of the national security complex.

In this way, the Obama administration has more than doubled
the total whistleblower prosecutions of all previous administrations
combined under the draconian World War I-era Espionage Act. It has also
gone after Army Private Bradley Manning for releasing secret military and State Department files to WikiLeaks, not only attempting to put him away for life for “aiding the enemy,” but subjecting him to particularly vindictive and abusive treatment while in military prison. In addition, it has threatenedjournalists who have written on or published leaked material and gone on expeditions into the telephone and email records of major media organizations.

All of this adds up to a new version of deterrence thinking in which a
potential whistleblower should know that he or she will experience a
lifetime of suffering for leaking anything; in which those, even in the highest reaches
of government, who consider speaking to journalists on classified
subjects should know that their calls could be monitored and their
whispers criminalized; and in which the media should know that reporting
on such subjects is not a healthy activity.

This
sort of deterrence already seemed increasingly extreme in nature; the
response to Snowden's revelations took it to a new level. Though the
U.S. government pursued WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange abroad (while reportedly preparing to indict him at home), the other whistleblower cases might all be considered national
security ones. The manhunt against Snowden is something new. Through
it, Washington is now punitively expanding twenty-first century
deterrence theory to the world.

The message is this: nowhere will you be safe from us if you breach
U.S. secrecy. Snowden’s will surely be a case study in how far the new
global security state is willing to go. And the answer is already in:
far indeed. We just don’t yet know exactly how far.

How to Down a Plane to (Not) Catch a Whistleblower

In this light, no incident has been more revealing than the downing
of the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales, the democratically
elected head of a sovereign Latin American nation, and not an official
enemy of the United States. Angry Bolivian authorities termed it a "kidnapping" or "imperialist hijack." It was, at the least, an act for which it’s hard to imagine a precedent.

Evidently officials in Washington believed that the plane bringing
the Bolivian president back from Moscow was also carrying Snowden. As a
result, the U.S. seems to have put enough pressure on four European
countries (France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy) to force that plane to
land for refueling in a fifth country (Austria). There -- again, U.S.
pressure seems to have been the crucial factor -- it was searched under disputed circumstances and Snowden not found.

So much is not known about what happened, in part because there has
been no serious reporting from Washington on the subject. The U.S.
media has largely ignored the American role in the downing of the plane,
an incident regularly described here as if the obvious hadn’t
happened. This may, at least in part, be the result of the Obama
administration’s implacable pursuit of whistleblowers and leakers right
into the phone records of reporters. The government has made such a
point of its willingness to pursue whistleblowers via journalists that,
as Associated Press President Gary Pruitt recently pointed out,
national security sources are drying up. Key figures in Washington are
scared to talk even off the record (now that “off” turns out to be
potentially very “on”). And the Justice Department’s new "tighter" guildelines for accessing reporters’ records are clearly filled with loopholes and undoubtedly little more than window dressing.

Still, it’s reasonable to imagine that when Morales's plane took off
from Moscow there were top U.S. officials gathered in a situation room (à la
the bin Laden affair), that the president was in the loop, and that the
intelligence people said something like: we have an 85% certainty that
Snowden is on that plane. Obviously, the decision was made to bring it
down and enough pressure was placed on key officials in those five
countries to cause them to bow to Washington's will.

One can certainly imagine that, but know it? At the moment, not a chance and, unlike in the raid that killed bin Laden, a triumphant situation-room photo
hasn't been released, since there was, of course, no triumph. Many
questions arise. Why, to mention just one, did Washington not allow
Morales’s plane to land for refueling in Portugal, as originally planned, and simply strong-arm the Portuguese into searching it? As with so much else, we don’t know.

We only know that, to bring five countries into line that way, the
pressure from Washington (or its local representatives) must have been
intense. Put another way: key officials in those countries must have
realized quickly that they stood in the way of a truly powerful urge by
the planet's superpower to get one fugitive. It was an urge so strong
that it overrode any other tactical considerations, and so opened the
way for Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua to offer asylum to Snowden
with the support of much of the rest of Latin America.

Imagine for a moment that an American president’s plane had been
brought down in a similar fashion. Imagine that a consortium of nations
pressured by, say, China or Russia, did it and that, with the president
aboard, it was then searched for a Chinese or Soviet “dissident.”
Imagine the reaction here. Imagine the shock. Imagine the accusations
of “illegality,” of "skyjacking," of “international terrorism.” Imagine
the 24/7 media coverage. Imagine the information pouring out of
Washington about what would no doubt have been termed "an act of war."

Of course, such a scenario is inconceivable on this one-way planet.
So instead, just think about the silence here over the Morales incident,
the lack of coverage, the lack of reporting, the lack of outrage, the
lack of shock, the lack of... well, just about anything at all.

Instead, the twenty-first-century version of deterrence theory ruled
the day, even though Snowden is the proof that deterrence via manhunts,
prosecution, imprisonment, and the like has proven ineffective when it
comes to leaks. It’s worth pointing out that what may be the two
largest leaks of official documents in history -- Bradley Manning’s and
Snowden’s -- happened in a country increasingly under the sway of
deterrence theory.

Slouching Toward Washington to Be Born

And yet don’t think that no one has been affected, no one
intimidated. Consider, for instance, a superior piece of recent
reporting by Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times. His front-page story, “In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of NSA,”
might once have sent shock waves through Washington and perhaps the
country as well. It did, after all, reveal how, in “more than a dozen
classified rulings,” a secret FISA court, which oversees the American
surveillance state, “has created a secret body of law” giving the NSA
sweeping new powers.

Here’s the paragraph that should have had Americans jumping out of
their skins (my italics added): “The 11-member Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on
approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in
legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations
were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court,
serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering
opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to
come, the officials said.”

At most moments in American history, the revelation that such a secret court, which never turns down
government requests, is making law “almost” at the level of the Supreme
Court would surely have caused an outcry in Congress and elsewhere.
However, there was none, a sign either of how powerful and intimidating
the secret world has become or of how much Congress and the rest of
Washington have already been absorbed into it.

No less strikingly -- and again, we know so little that it’s
necessary to read between the lines -- Lichtblau indicates that more
than six “current and former national security officials,” perhaps
disturbed by the expanding powers of the FISA court, discussed its
classified rulings "on the condition of anonymity.” Assumedly, at least
one of them (or someone else) leaked the classified information about
that court to him.

Fittingly enough, Lichtblau wrote a remarkably anonymous piece.
Given that sources no longer have any assurance that phone and email
records aren’t being or won't be monitored, we have no idea how these
shadowy figures got in touch with him or vice versa. All we know is
that, even when shining a powerful light into the darkness of the
surveillance universe, American journalism now finds itself plunging
into the shadows as well.

What both the Morales incident and the Lichtblau article tell us, and
what we’ve barely taken in, is how our American world is changing. In
the Cold War years, faced with a MAD world, both superpowers ventured
“into the shadows” to duke it out in their global struggle. As in so
many wars, sooner or later the methods used in distant lands came home
to haunt us. In the twenty-first century, without another major power
in sight, the remaining superpower has made those “shadows” its own in a
big way. Just beyond the view of the rest of us, it began recreating
its famed tripartite, checks-and-balances government, now more than two
centuries old, in a new form. There, in those shadows, the executive,
judicial, and legislative branches began to meld into a unicameral
shadow government, part of a new architecture of control that has
nothing to do with “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Such a shadow government placing its trust in secret courts and the
large-scale surveillance of populations, its own included, while
pursuing its secret desires globally was just the sort of thing that the
country’s founding fathers feared. In the end, it hardly matters under
what label -- including American “safety” and “security” -- such a
governing power is built; sooner or later, the architecture will
determine the acts, and it will become more tyrannical at home and more
extreme abroad. Welcome to the world of the single rogue superpower,
and thank your lucky stars that Edward Snowden made the choices he did.

It’s eerie that some aspects of the totalitarian governments that
went down for the count in the twentieth century are now being recreated
in those shadows. There, an increasingly “totalistic” if not yet
totalitarian beast, its hour come round at last, is slouching toward
Washington to be born, while those who cared to shine a little light on
the birth process are in jail or being hounded across this planet.

We have now experienced deterrence theory in two centuries. Once it
was brought to bear to stop the wholesale destruction of the planet;
once -- and they do say
that if the first time is tragedy, the second is farce -- to deter a
small number of whistleblowers from revealing the innards of our new global security state.
We came close enough to total tragedy once. If only we could be
assured that the second time around it would indeed be total farce, but
at the moment, as far as I can tell, no one’s laughing.